US efforts to help Japan lay bare its financial weak spot Katie Martin katie.martin@ft.com Settings Print Share Listen The US Treasury’s adventures in the Japanese yen may sound rather abstract — the kind of “big macro” event that excites chinstroking wannabe central bank governors and tiresome nerds who live for the inner workings of the currencies market. (OK, guilty as charged on the second point. I blame a misspent youth.) It is also, on a superficial level, quite straightforward and uncontroversial. Japan’s currency has been tumbling for months, seemingly beyond the level justified by gaps between global interest rates alone. Japan wanted help and the US, its steadfast ally, was happy to oblige, buying some yen, spooking the speculators and promising further joint action if the market doesn’t behave. The whole thing might possibly even work — a rarity in a market that routinely humbles anyone seeking to tame it. It is a generou...
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To fix education, the economy will need fixing first John Burn-Murdoch john.burn-murdoch@ft.com Settings Print Share Listen One of the best illustrations of the importance of economic growth for a society is that when it is weak for long enough, you start to hear complaints about specific things going wrong in specific domains, which ultimately all turn out to be downstream of economic stagnation. In the UK, this is happening more frequently with education. The standard explanation for the declining graduate wage premium is that higher education expanded too fast and too far, and too many people now go to university. But similar expansions elsewhere have not produced the same outcome. Instead, the evidence points primarily to problems in the economy, not the education system: weak productivity growth and an unusually low number of genuinely graduate-worthy wellpaid professional and managerial jobs. In much the same way, the ...
America’s new oligarchy The system of government is increasingly dominated by an economic elite that has parlayed its immense riches into tangible political influence, raising concerns about democratic integrity. By Guy Chazan Settings Print Share Listen In America’s Gilded Age, millionaire robber barons operated from the shadows, bribing pliant lawmakers to do their bidding. Under President Donald Trump, billionaires have gone one better. Some are in his cabinet. According to one widely cited estimate, Trump’s cabinet members have a combined estimated net worth of $7.5bn, making his administration the richest in American history. Including Trump himself, the figure reaches roughly $14bn. The US has long prided itself on being the world’s leading democracy. But its system of government is increasingly dominated by an economic elite that has parlayed its immense riches into tangible political influence. “Now the tycoo...
Let’s unpack that Why Yvette Cooper is the last hope to fix the NHS maternity nightmare In the midst of Britain’s ongoing maternity crisis highlighted in horrific investigations that demand action, Radhika Sanghani explores why a female health secretary could signal a turning point – so long as she listens to the campaigners calling for urgent change Radhika Sanghani Wednesday 05 August 2026 09:12 Listen The state of Britain’s maternity wards is so bad that recent reports have found mothers were left to “bleed out” in bathrooms while babies have suffered avoidable deaths. It’s no surprise that maternity care in the UK is now referred to as a “crisis”; maternal deaths are rising by a fifth in a decade (a rate that is much higher among black women ), and two-thirds of England’s maternity units fail to meet required safety standards. Campaigners, bereaved families, charities, midwives and expectant mothers like myself...